'Bliss' Mini-Mural Project June, 2013

    The call went out to submit ideas for the next round of Mini-Murals on the train viaduct here in Oak Park, IL.  Never to miss an opportunity I submitted an image that once again emphasized my interest in the arts.  I chose to base my piece on a painting I had made a few years back that featured a leaping dancer hovering in the midst of celebratory figures playing music on a variety of instruments.  Stylistically I tipped my hand heavily toward some of the traditional modernist:  Picasso, Matisse, and Chagall.  
  The process is fairly straight forward.   I sketch a quick grid onto the wall to transfer the image and over the course of about 12-15 hours the work evolves, pretty close to what I anticipated.  In the end it's fun to compare the finished product with the original sketch held,   The question is which one is which?

 

Reinventions

I'm experimenting with Picasa and having a lot of fun.  I actually feel as though I'm cheating because I've been able to achieve affects that I could never have imagined and even if I could, I could not have created by hand.  

Cubists

It is one thing to mop a floor.  It is another thing to mop a head.  These pieces have gone through a number of transformations .    The first being  part of a piece celebrating Edgar Allen Poe.  The second incarnation as the severed heads of  King Richard’s rivals in an installation referring to Shakespeare’s ‘Richard III’. 

  In thislast incarnation the mops have become part of  cubistic portraits.    They are still works in process. 

 

Make Art, Not Vegetables!

Although I don’t’ believe I am, there are those who think I am…. a hoader. Yes, OK. I admit it. I collect lots of weird stuff. Why? Because you never know when it might come in handy. Recently in honor of Earth Day there was a call from the local library to collect plastics caps and lids, not to throw them into a recycling bin, but to make art. Well, over years of teaching and painting and never being able to let anything go, I accumulated bins and bags of plastic lids, cups, tops and marker caps, scraps of wood and who knows what else. Well, it finally occurred to me that after of years of trying to coax my scraggly tomato plants into baring even just a handful of fruit, it was time to try something entirely new. I decided that this season there would be no more weeds and vegetables growing in my garden. This year it’s time to go back not to nature but to my bins and bags. It’s plastic and wood scraps all the way baby.

Raw Faces

After cutting up canvas that I staple around the wooden stretchers that eventually become paintings I am frequently left with long thin strips of material.  The wider remnants I resew together  and  am able to ‘reuse’ again to be  restretched  for another painting.  But what to do with those pieces that are too narrow to be resewn?    Weave them, of course, loose threads and all.  My default is the portrait.   

Mosaics

This series began with a painting called The Romantics that I  had made into a giclee print.  I cut two of the prints into strips and wove them back together to create the  checkerboard texture visible in the portraits.  The two figures in the prints  were used  as points of departure for the portraits.  After cutting the portraits in half I paired them separately creating a conflicting kind of dissonant.  

Brothers

 I love exploring issues of identity and diversity. In this series I riffed on the same kind of process that I’ve explored numerous times before. I drew similar but not identical portraits which I then I divided and cut into similar but not identical rectangular shapes. I then mixed up the rectangles and reassembled them into new portraits which accounts for their rather distorted shapes and dissonant features. Then I added color to the portraits divided each face into four parts that I cut apart once again. After reshuffling the components I reassembled them into new portraits that once again are different yet still all related to each other, just like siblings in families, from one generation to another.